The age-old joke in the gaming scene goes something like this: If you have a platform, there's a good chance that someone has tried to port iD Software's 1993 classic, "Doom," to the system. It's gone to the Dreamcast and the iPod, the Wii, and Adobe's Flash Player, and you can now count the grayscale backdrop of Texas Instruments' line of graphing calculators as the next step for Doom's nameless protagonist.

User "DJ_O," a self-identified, 24-year old male from Quebec, Canada who posts on the Omnimaga graphing calculator coding board, has released a video of a full-fledged Doom port running on a Texas Instruments Nspire device. The unique thing about this variant of the game is that it's, quite literally, Doom  unlike some "Doom" versions, running on legacy calculators like the TI-83, which try to offer a reinterpretation of the game that's designed to fit the device's lesser hardware specs.

No, "nDoom," as dubbed by its creator, "Mrakoplaz," is Doom just as you'd find it on any conventional PCminus sound and music, obviously, and using the 16 different shades of gray capable of being output by the Nspire's 320-by-240 pixel screen.

The only catch is that nDoom only runs for about 30 seconds or so before crashing the calculator. That's a bit less than even the fastest level completion times given by the best Doom speed-runners, so don't expect to be able to make much progress in the title in its current incarnation. Mrakoplaz is designing the port to be able to execute any .WAD (modification) that the game's PC version would be able to handle, but there's been no indication that nDoom will any of the game's famous cheat codes in any variety.

The TI-Nspire runs with 16 megabytes of operating memory alongside a 90 MHz processornot a lot of overhead for much gaming, but clearly enough for one of the scene's classic titles. Be sure to check out the video of Mrakoplaz's work below:

David Murphy got his first real taste of technology journalism when he arrived at PC Magazine as an intern in 2005. A three-month gig turned to six months, six months turned to occasional freelance assignments, and he has since rejoined his tech-loving, mostly New York-based friends as one of PCMag.com's news contributors.
His rise to (self-described) fame in the world of tech journalism began during his stint as an associate editor at Maximum PC, where his love of cardboard-based PC construction and meetings put him in...
More »